Hypertextuality and the notion of the work

This is kind of an extended reflection of some issues I discussed earlier.

Wikis and blogs are never finished pieces of work. Like I have written in my dissertation on a film adaptation of Jin Yong's Shendiao Xialu, Brave Archer and His Mate, adaptation fragments the narrative. Since wikis, blogs and other forms of online writing often adapt (in a broader metaphorical sense) other works of the same genre or nature, they echo Bazin's observation that:

[I]t is possible to imagine that we are moving toward a reign of the adaptation in which the notion of the unity of the work of art, if not the very notion of the author himself, will be destroyed.

Where so-called adaptations and originals are actually how:

a single work [is] reflected through [multiple] art forms, an artistic pyramid with only an ideal point at the top of this figure, which itself is an ideal construct. The chronological precedence of one part over another would not be aesthetic criterion any more than the chronological precedence of one twin over the other is a genealogical one.[1]

The destabilized work, never complete or completed, is well embodied in hypertexts like our blogs and wikis. George Landow, on his Cyberspace, Hypertext, & Critical Theory site, defines one kind of hypertext in reference to Roland Barthes' seminal work, S/Z:

In S/Z , Roland Barthes describes an ideal textuality that precisely matches that which has come to be called computer hypertext -- text composed of blocks of words (or images) linked electronically by multiple paths, chains, or trails in an open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality described by the terms link, node, network, web , and path.[2]

Yet if this textuality is meant to be "ideal," then using such "perpetually unfinished" texts as part of assessment mode would be self-defeating in traditional assessment means, although they certainly tie in with the vision of lifelong learning because of they can be perpetuated, thus allowing also authentic assessment that observes student progress over long periods of time.

References

[1] Bazin, André. “Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest.” 1948; trans. Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo, 1997. In Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000, pp. 19-27.

[2] Cyberspace, Hypertext, & Critical Theory